Diebert wrote:Truth leads to emptiness and no-becoming, it's the trans-personal truth of all ages. The delusive and addictive power game cannot be played by a truth seeker. And so he's destined to attempt to sacrifice identity and all the meaning provided by the power games of the world. Without any further goal than the will to truth, to itself. The Question is what he then becomes. The only possible opposite to power, if anything, is nature itself, as reality, or the infinite. All else will necessarily lead to power, cult, religion and a new provided, dependent identity again. All by design, by its very nature.
There are a few different ways to go about responding to this very interesting conjunct of ideas! I start with a few observations:
One is that there seems to be in it a general and pervasive critique of and distain for 'power'. Additionally, the critique 'against power' as it were has quite evident Marxian tones, and naturally one could only say that this is quite normal since Marxian ideas have penetrated all of us down to the floor-struts. I am surprised to see it expressed so directly though. So, and at least in some (large?) part, Marxian criticism is itself a critical acid that is applied first as a 'mist' which has the effect of challenging one's assumptions about the present (its trajectory from the past). Surely there is a 'will' evident in the known and 'hard' Marxian programmes---everyone is aware of this---but what is more relevant for 'us' is, as I have suggested, the manner in which the exponents of the Frankfort School (I still use this as a general symbol though I am also referring to specific theory and theorists who can be named and brought forward) apply a 'gentler' application of the same
will which is, in my view, destructive in its constructiveness.
Here, now, and to avoid completely 'the excluded middle'---a territory of argumentation which is fatal!---one has to come out and state, openly and directly, that
it all has to do with Power. It was about power in the past, it is about power now, and it will be in the future and for all time about power. There is no part of the natural world's advent---no cloud formation in the atmosphere, no tide-movement, no field of swaying grass, nor flight of birds---which does not emanate and flow out of a power-dynamic. Stars, universes, multiplexes of universes: it all arises out of Power and indeed 'power' and 'force' are the essential and also mysterious qualities that no one can explain. We are in this world, we have our being, in a 'power-play', or if you wanted to get fancy you could say 'cosmic dance of power'. So, 'power' as a fact is quite precisely that: a fact.
So it appears to me---and I have had to anticipate and to respond within myself to the (as you say) hypocritically-based
ressentiment-filled arguments about and against 'power'---that the first order of business for any soul in our realm is to come to terms with 'power'. Many questions arise from this inquiry. But let us say that a blind and fear-based critique of power---fear and loathing really---or a critique (as with the Marxists) that seeks to critique formulated and structured power to
weaken it so that its power-structures can be penetrated and then toppled (or modified, or restructured, or feminised and 'humanised')---is very much a part of the modern psychological landscape. I suggest that this is almost a reflex. It is an attitude that has been *installed* in people though they do not think about it nor do they think it through to its consequences. If this is true then we should be able to identify and to describe---and critique---these effects as they take shape in the European landscape and in the European mind (the English-speaking world). And if we can do this we can also turn a light on the formulations of, say, a Dutch citizen ... ;-)
But really this means any of us now.
Another part of your critique---I would say that it is predictable---is to bring up this general-use notion of 'delusion'. On this Forum it is one of the key words, or trigger-words, along with 'the All' and 'A is A' and also 'Enlightenment' which are easily handled concepts that get picked up and are used as critical tools. But even with words and concepts that are employed as reductions and for reductive purposes the ideas behind the concepts are not without some substance or merit.
So, and at least as I see things, I think the first order of business is to confront the terms themselves, to challenge them, to critique them and the way that they are used. To say that 'agreement was a delusion' is a truism in a way, or from a certain perspective. But if that is true then it follows that all agreements, in any system, now and forever will be necessarily delusional in relative degrees. The critique, and the use of the word delusion, implies that there is a non-delusion to which one could recur, but if it is the GF program that is under the critical microscope (though really my desire for conversation goes beyond the specificity of these fellows), one would be forced to say that one level of delusion simply replaces another, and what occurs is a game of identifying delusions! In this game one abstracts oneself from reality, purifies one's language of nouns that connect it to the world, atomises oneself away from relationship and productive activity in the world, to exist then 'non-delusively'.
But a more important point is that the use of the term 'delusion' and 'delusional' can be itself challenged. And in this sense if I say that some past age, say the Medieval Era, offered a general viewstructure of Reality that had solidity and also a great deal of sense (and with this I refer to Aquinas and to Augustine as 'pillars' if you will of that structure), I would say that the overarching sense of 'it' should not be described, and thus jettisoned, as a 'delusion'. But this is exactly what some here
DO with their dismissive and critical terms and labels. Their critique is acidic and not synthetic.
And oddly enough---I think this becomes clear at certain junctures---you demonstrate with this post how you too are connected to some of these critical projects, and in the post above you seem to spell it out in unusually clear terms. This explains I suppose your basic postmodernist perspective; that is, the force of your argument, at a basic level, is postmodernist. Now, the other interesting part of this, in my view, is how Zen and Buddhist doctrine (to the degree that it is doctrine and not bandying of trigger terms) functions well within a Marxian-influenced structure of activity. Again, these critiques are used like 'acids' to dissolve away the structure
out of which we come because the structure itself appears to us as corrupt, or we simply hate it, or can't bear it, or can make no sense of it, or that we see its destructive aspects, or that we resent how power is wielded by it, and we seek to 'change' it, or ourselves in relation to it. Should one say that this is all invalid? That it is wrong? That it has no use? Not at all.
Again all that I can say is that confronted by all these tricks and strategies and rhetorical flips and tightrope dances I have been forced to trace back to the structures out of which we come. But this of course means more than just tracing back to a Medieval period, or 'return to the Church' which is a move some people make. No. The greater point is to understand---this is my view---that a cosmic order is not only implied but is existent. This is the logical inference of scholasticism and represents the use of
intellectus.
A good portion of what else you write, for example this:
- Or the emperor just has rather few clothes on these days. The postmodern notion of "inside-out" turning? But I believe it was not all that different in the past when it comes to having some "base". That base is the luxury of any analysis of the past, never the present! That's why all classical authors and prophets have the same complaint about their present! What appears to happen these days is that people are more and more struggling with their own inherited power structures, trying to abolish them as "evil" while so much of our modern identity is still tied up with it. It's like sawing off the very branch one is firmly perched on!
Seems to me more or less only opinion. You play within opinion. Your grasp of things seems inflected by a mood you have about things. Echoes of Baudrillard? I wish to point out that
impressions and opinions do not qualify as serious terms of discourse though they are not altogether invalid. It is not enough to just opine though. I admit that your opinions or to be more generous your conclusions have a certain weight. But they seem to have less weight when the ideas that support them are challenged. I don't invalidate them because they have a place. But I think more is required.